From the Desert to the Well
by Amatara
Summary: They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Charles never quite knew what that meant, until now.  X-Men: First Class fic, character study involving Charles, Raven, Erik and Moira. Gen, unless you squint. :


**From the Desert to the Well**

* * *

He finds her out front, squatting on the rain-slicked granite steps. If he squints, he can just make her out against the darkness, a silent shape the colour of night.

"Raven?" He hurries out in his pyjamas and slippers. The downpour rushes in his ears, but not as loud as the rush of fear that tumbles down with it, lodging somewhere in the centre of his chest. "What are you _doing? _You shouldn't be outside looking like this, what if they –"

"Shh!" Raven hisses, with a sweep of hair when she turns, hair long and lank and dripping water, and suddenly scarlet enough from up close he imagines the whole town could see. "Be _quiet_! Or you'll scare it…"

Obligingly, he slithers down the steps to crouch beside her. "Scare _what_?" Then, remembering his anger, "Raven, you promised! When you're outside, you should be looking – well, _normal_. What if somebody sees you?" He frowns and tries to look stern. What he doesn't say is how scared he gets when she does this; if anyone knew, they might take her away.

Raven rolls her eyes, unimpressed. "There's no one out here, silly." She nudges him in the ribs. "And if anyone sees me, you'll just make them forget they did, right?"

"I… suppose so. Yes," he says, feeling better the moment he does. It's right, too. He can_. _He doesn't have to let anyone take her. Ever. "Of course I will."

"Good," she grins, then points at a spot near the bottom of the stairs. "Do you see it?"

Charles narrows his eyes to slits. Unsurprisingly, the answer is no; his eyesight's no match for Raven's, but for a moment he could swear something moved in the shadows. He licks his lips and lifts two fingers to his face. Sure enough, there's something down there: a quick, prickly mind, like a hundred nervous heartbeats crowding each other. Frightened, but curious, and…

"She's hungry," he whispers, watching Raven follow the skulking kitten with her eyes.

Raven is beaming. "She's been here four nights in a row. I put out some milk for her." Charles considers the little saucer through the kitten's eyes, a bright white beacon – his mother's best china, he notes disinterestedly – shimmering against the stone. "But she hasn't come up to drink. I think she doesn't trust me yet." She holds out her hand and makes a cooing noise. "C'mere, kitty. It's okay, don't be scared –"

He isn't even aware of doing it. One moment, he's hovering over pool of bright, shiny kitten thoughts, the next he's dipped into them and scooped out the suspicion, the fear. He nudges gently, and then the kitten is leaping up the stairs and lapping at the milk. Charles pulls back feeling slightly woozy but pleased with himself.

Raven's grin of delight lasts exactly two seconds. Then it dawns on her. "What'd you do _that_ for?" she snaps, scrambling to get her feet under her. She almost slips, catches herself the last moment.

"I – said it could trust you," he says, stunned. Only now does he realize the rain's still coming down hard, and he's drenched to his skin. "I took away its –"

"– fear?" she cuts him off. "Charles, I was making an _effort. _I've been out here for days! It doesn't count if you don't even have to _try_!" She's up then, hands on hips, looking furious. "Do you know anything about cats, Charles? They're free, they're independent; they don't come to you unless they want to! You can't just go around doing whatever you please –"

"I did it for _you_," he protests, groping for something more clever to say. But the part of his mind that's thinking _you wouldn't mind my doing it to people if I had to _remains woefully silent. "I didn't hurt it," he adds feebly, swiping wet hair from his face. And then he just wishes Raven would cry, or stomp her feet, or punch him, or do anything except turn those wide, sad, copper eyes on him.

"Just because it doesn't look like you, doesn't mean you have the right, Charles."

He wants to say that wasn't why, but it would be kind of missing the point.

* * *

The first times he takes a girl home, he feels guilty.

Not the same night, of course. He's made sure he has enough drinks in him, mouth pliant and smiling as he steals cheeky truths from her lips. There are rules, obviously. He only flirts because she fancies him, only pounces once he knows she's game. He might be easy, but he'll never be _that_; use his ability to please others, yes, but not to force-feed them feelings that aren't real. Never mind that Raven insists there's no difference, that it's a matter of degree and not principle. What would she have him do, then: plug his eyes and ears as well?

There are others, later, different and the same. He watches their faces when they come, cupping their temples with one hand as he makes their spines arch with the other. If he's tipsy enough, he lets himself feel it. He can't manage precision when he's horny and hard, so he digs deep, sipping out their little secrets like cola from a straw. Its only later, when he's sober, that he ponders what other secrets he took.

"You know your problem?" Raven tells him once, sprawled across the sofa with her stockinged feet propped up in his lap. "You know everything about them from day one. All _they_ know is how well you fuck." She smirks, toes curling around his knee. "Admit it, Charles. Things can only go downhill from there."

He pulls a face and pinches her calf, not giving her the satisfaction of being right. She is, though. The more he starts out knowing about them, the faster they'll tire of him and slip away.

Moira, it seems, has the advantage of _him_. It isn't just that he's drunk and she's sober, or that she knows so much about him while he's never even heard her name. Her annoyance at him thaws slowly, slow enough that he wonders just how obnoxious he's been. But when he drops the bomb about what he can do, she doesn't gasp, or run, or stare in awe, or call him liar. She just blinks, unafraid, and asks for his help.

"You know how long I've waited for this?" he murmurs, bracing his head in both palms. Strange: his mind has cleared, but his body seems to refuse to agree. "To find other mutants. And now that it's happened –"

"– you're too wasted to celebrate?" She cocks her head.

"That wasn't…" He notes the gleam in her eyes far too late for a graceful save. "… quite what I meant to say. But yes. That too." He smiles feebly, hand to his mouth, and prays to God he isn't projecting right now. "I'm sorry. Until today, they had me fooled that the main goal of a doctorate was to quaff four litres of ale in one go. I'll admit that part didn't live up to expectations."

"Oh, I know," she says, straight-faced. "I could tell you about _my _thesis defence, but apart from those first few drinks I really don't recall a thing." There's a story there, one she expects him to ask for, only he rather thinks he may throw up if he opens his mouth. But his curiosity is piqued, and he's halfway to probing for it when it hits him –

She never told him not to. She just took it for granted from the start.

He'll ask her next time, he thinks, feeling oddly light.

* * *

It only dawns on him later that he could have stopped Erik with a thought. He had the means as well as the justification: it was a CIA mission, Moira was calling the shots, and there was no question about the idiocy of storming a Russian official's home single-handed. He could have sent Erik to sleep, taken his legs out from under him, frozen his voice in his throat. Any of those would have been easy. Any of those would have been _wrong_, but the truth is, at the time it didn't even occur to him.

He tells Erik as much their first night at the mansion, safely ensconced in the drawing room as Raven gives the others the grand tour of the grounds.

"Why didn't you?" Erik says, "Stop me?" Fatigue tugs at the corners of his mouth, and Charles goes to pour them more scotch only to stop himself from looking.

"I'm not sure," he admits. His fingers feel stiff and clumsy around the bottle. "I was distracted. It never crossed my mind. This is new to me as well, you know, seeing myself as a –"

"– a weapon?" Erik finishes the thought for him. "But you are. We all are." Charles doesn't hear him cross the carpet until he's right at his shoulder, reaching across him to pick up his drink. "Three mutants, up against two hundred armed men guarding a top secret facility? Don't make me point out the obvious."

Charles presses the glass to his lips. "They never stood a chance."

"No, they didn't. _We_ would have, though." One thing about Erik is how he innocuous he sounds when he's pressing his point home. "You'd do well to remember that when the human race turns against us."

"You just said they're defenceless."

"As individuals, yes. But so are some of us. Some of us are _kids, _Charles, cast off by their parents because of what they are. They need us to stand together, be strong." At least Erik shows him the courtesy of not adding _like Raven does, _or presuming to know what his sister needs. "Not all of us are weapons, but we owe it to others to realize that we can be."

Charles knows this; the knowledge's been churning inside him for days. "I'm not saying," he mutters, "we're no different from them. Humans, mutants... of course there's a difference. But is the chasm so deep that it can't be bridged?" He doesn't bother to point out that Erik, too, is everything he's not, is as different from him as any person could be.

Erik sighs, the already familiar sigh of hitched impatience. "Just answer me this. Before all this started, before anyone knew what you could do, did you ever ask any of _them _for permission? Did you even think twice? I know you screwed up with Hank, but you asked the rest of us; you've asked me. So you do draw the line between us and them, Charles, as surely as I do. The only question is whether we draw it with pencils or knives."

"I've asked," he protests, sounding as petulant as a spoiled child. "I asked the director after he took us in. I asked Moira…"

"Making exceptions to a rule doesn't mean there _is_ no rule, Charles. On the contrary. You stand with them because you wantit, not because you've got any grounds to."

Charles swallows, drink sloshing in his grip. How can he explain that he stands with them because he _is_ them; that he's carried their thoughts, their hopes, their dreams inside him all his life? That for him, to inflict harm is to experience it, intimately, which makes inflicting harm a far too personal thing? It's why he stopped for that Russian soldier he found struggling against the wire: because he couldn't feel it and _not _stop, and he couldn't bring himself not to feel it. He's long considered that a blessing, but right now it seems like he's feeling altogether too much.

"Breathe, Charles," Erik says sharply. A hand covers his on the glass, tugs until he lets go. Again that sigh. "Don't tell me this came as a revelation." Erik's tone is raw, but his skin breathes a tenderness that leaves Charles reeling; that he isn't sure he has deserved. He groans and buries his doubts into the rise of Erik's throat, into the sparse little hollow at the base of his spine. What if it's true: what if they are just, both of them, exceptions to each other's rules? What if they can't find a middle ground because there is none? Suddenly he feels foolish and small and not at all equipped to handle this.

This isn't a battle, so how come he's losing?

* * *

As it goes, it's not even his choice to make.

In a way, he thinks dimly, scattered onto the sand like so many broken promises, it wasn't even Erik's. Their choices were grown, not made, writ across their minds from the day they were born – in Erik's case, across his skin. They can spin themselves justifications forever, it won't change that premise. Erik tried to tell him as much. He was just too caught up in himself to hear.

Moira's hands replace Erik's under his shoulders, and Charles gasps for the sole purpose of not screaming instead. The pain of failure is as real as the fire in his spine; as real as the terror, thick and choking, at finding a void where limbs should be. He wrests it under control somehow, with a strength he didn't know he had. Raven's thoughts are a jagged mess he couldn't block if he tried, but she, too, has made her choice. He won't make it harder. He just cradles her hand like he can swallow her whole and save her, feeling nothing like that nine-year-old who presumed that he could. He'll fight Erik's choices when he has to, but he won't fight Erik, or her. Not because he shouldn't; because he doesn't want to.

They can't both be right, he and Erik, so perhaps they're both wrong. Perhaps the world is both a better and a worse place than they imagine. Charles thinks he could possibly live with that hope.


End file.
